


Sunny Boy's Lament

by rubyjayne



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Tags to be added, arthur is kinda angsty, merlin has tattoos again
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:53:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29967357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rubyjayne/pseuds/rubyjayne
Summary: It’s not that Arthur doesn’t know what he wants in life, it’s that everything he has ever wanted has always eventually gone cold and left a dull metallic taste in his mouth. Every expensive hobby he’s carelessly slapped onto his dad’s credit card, every subject in school he thought he might eventually major in, every girl he’s ever kissed, all of it, all inevitably going flat like the half-drunk bottles of shitty off-brand soda sitting forgotten on the bottom shelf of his fridge.A modern AU where Arthur meets Merlin at his summer job.
Relationships: Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Sunny Boy's Lament

**Author's Note:**

> last night i was feeling very nostalgic about suburban teenage summers and shitty part time jobs and this just... sort of happened? title is from a song of the same name by laundry day, for no particular reason other than i listened to it on repeat while writing this and it feels weirdly fitting. 
> 
> enjoy!!
> 
> as always, i don’t own bbc merlin and please don’t post to other sites!

Arthur had been perfectly content to spend his summer loafing around the house uselessly, going to the occasional house party where he’d pretend to enjoy bad beer—not because he really wants to, but because he feels like he’s _supposed_ to want to—and pestering Morgana about whoever she ends up dating, but Uther had quickly made it clear that he found his plans, or lack thereof, less than acceptable.

So this morning, not more than a week after school had let out for the summer, he’d pulled himself out of bed at a fucking _ungodly_ hour of the morning, gotten ready, and forced himself to grit his teeth into a smile and nod dutifully as Uther poured himself a coffee and said something about how a summer job would be good for him, teach him some responsibility, or discipline, or something like that, before bustling out the door, leaving Arthur to walk to the public library down the street for his first day of work. It was the first place to call him back after an embarrassing number of interviews, and yeah, it was only part time hours and just barely minimum wage, but so was fucking _everything_ , and it wasn’t like it actually mattered at all, so he’d accepted the offer immediately, if only to get his dad off his back.

Arthur drags his feet across the sidewalk as he walks, the buzz of people using their lawnmowers way too early—no doubt waking up countless irate teens—and the smell of freshly cut grass wafting out from behind more than one of the houses he walks by. There’s not a cloud in the sky and the sun is ridiculously bright, and he looks up to watch it’s rays filter down through the green canopy of towering oak trees that line the street. Even with their shade, it’s swelteringly hot. A bead of sweat trails its way down his neck, creeping down the back of the only button down shirt he owns, and he hates the fact that he’s wearing this and stiff khakis instead of shorts, but _professionalism,_ or whatever. He looks back down just in time to narrowly avoid stepping on a line of ants rapidly marching across the concrete and into a crack in the sidewalk where a few blades of grass and a single dandelion have stubbornly pushed their way up. Arthur stands there for a long, drawn out moment, watching the last of their orderly row disappear beneath the ground. He almost envies their purposefulness. 

It's a few minutes before nine when Arthur arrives at the library, its beige brick walls yellowed with age and the garden out front blooming brightly, just the same as they always are, and the person who hired him is nowhere in sight. That's less than ideal. But then the bespectacled woman who’s been a constant fixture at the circulation desk ever since he was checking out Robert Munsch books as a kid, sees him looking lost and gracefully steps in, asking if he’s the new summer student. When Arthur nods yes and tells her his name, she introduces herself as Barbara—he feels supremely embarrassed that he’d never bothered to learn her name in all his years of coming here—and shows him where to sign in each shift, then hands him a staff ID badge and a key card and instructs him to go look for someone named Merlin to start his training.

“He’ll show you everything you need to know dear,” she says, smiling kindly at him in a way that reminds him of his grandmother. “You can’t miss him, he’s the only other young man in here today with a staff badge, alright? Black hair, about your height, think I saw him in the non-fiction section a moment ago.” 

And she waves him off and turns to a frazzled patron who needs help logging into one of the computers, leaving Arthur to fend for himself. But as he soon finds out, this Merlin person is more elusive than Morgana when their horrendously bigoted extended family visit during the holidays, and Arthur ends up doing an entire circuit of all three floors of the library, avoiding the scrutinizing glances of other employees who are no doubt wondering why the new guy isn’t getting anything done.

After one last desperate walkthrough of the young adult section, without seeing a single person matching Barbara’s description, Arthur wanders back downstairs to a lounge area littered with cozy armchairs and houseplants, where a single elderly man in a tweed suit is seated reading a newspaper. Beams of sunlight shine in through a wall made up almost entirely of windowpanes, their rays criss-crossing onto the floor and, as he learns, heating up the steely-gray metal rows of magazine stands until they’re warm to the touch.

He picks up a copy of some obnoxiously colourful sports magazine that he’d gotten a monthly subscription to when he was a kid and flips through the pages, squinting against the sun. He hasn’t read an issue in years, probably stopped sometime after he made the football team in freshman year, and now here he is, entering senior year this coming fall and adamantly refusing to join the team again, no matter what Uther says about recruiters and scholarships. He’s never bothered to cancel the subscription, the thought hasn’t even crossed his mind until this moment, and so magazines still come in the mail, month after month, and pile up unread by the dozens in his room, a flagrant symbol of every interest of his that staled before he ever fully committed to it. 

It’s not that Arthur doesn’t know what he wants in life, it’s that everything he has ever wanted has always eventually gone cold and left a dull metallic taste in his mouth. Every expensive hobby he’s carelessly slapped onto his dad’s credit card, every subject in school he thought he might eventually major in, every girl he’s ever kissed, all of it, all inevitably going flat like the half-drunk bottles of shitty off-brand soda sitting forgotten on the bottom shelf of his fridge.

He closes the magazine, the glossy image of Cristiano Ronaldo on the cover smiling up at him tauntingly, and turns to place it back on the magazine stand, smiling politely at a girl—warm brown eyes, a smattering of freckles across tan cheeks, and really quite pretty—who’s just entered the aisle. She returns the smile, says “Excuse me”, and brushes past him, laptop clutched to her chest with wrists clad in jangling bracelets and dark curls trailing out from a messy bun atop her head. He gets a whiff of vanilla and lavender as she walks by and thinks vaguely to himself that she’s the type of girl that he’d probably try to talk to if he was at a party, egged on by friends hoping to see him strike out for their own entertainment.

She’s stopped at the end of the aisle and is astutely studying a knitting magazine, sneaking glances back at him every now and again, and he thinks that maybe he still ought to try to talk to her now, though nobody’s watching. But then he thinks about it, thinks about the whole tired thing, about introducing himself and asking her name and dancing around the subject of her phone number until the perfect moment, and he just can’t muster up the will. So he puts the magazine back down, making a mental note to cancel the subscription as soon as he gets home, and heads back towards the non-fiction section.

The dense thicket of shelves provides a much needed escape from the open space in the middle of the library, where a handful of people are milling about. There’s a lone student taking over an entire table, multiple charging wires from a laptop, a phone, and who knows what other devices, snaking around him and plugged into the extension bar by his feet, sitting buried in a pile of notes and from the utterly miserable look on his face, probably already regretting the decision to enrol in summer classes. Looking at him, for a moment, Arthur is almost glad that he’s here working- it preferable to cramming for a test, at least. A couple of young parents are heading upstairs, probably to some children’s event, and the excited babbling of their toddlers as they clamber clumsily up the stairs is one of the only noises in the library that stands out from the low hum of occasional whispers and shuffling chairs. 

But the kids eventually disappear into a room, the glass walls of which are plastered with endearingly crude crayon drawings, and then it’s quiet again, awfully, stiflingly quiet. Arthur can’t _stand_ it. He’s wandered aimlessly so far around the non-fiction section that he’s almost back at the circulation desk again, still with no sight of the guy, Merlin, who’s supposed to be helping him figure out whatever the fuck he’s supposed to be doing. He thinks about telling Barbara he can’t find him, but from the glimpse of her he catches between rows of books, she’s still dealing with a handful of clueless patrons, so he turns and weaves back through the shelves until he reaches the furthest back wall.

A long window overlooks the historic main street, their little town’s pride and joy, and Arthur wistfully remembers summers spent trekking to the controversial Baskin Robbins that sprung up there a few years ago. It was a huge commercial eyesore, according to concerned parental advisory boards, but there it still was, tucked in joyfully between quaint local shops and immaculately tasteful pastel-painted businesses. Facing the window, there’s a row of desks with partitions in between each seat, all unsurprisingly covered in pen scrawls and carved expletives, as they’ve always been, and this is where Arthur used to find himself on the rare occasion he came here to actually study, back when he had to keep up his grades or risk getting kicked off the team.

There’s also a nondescript door there, almost blending into a small patch of wall that separates the row of desks from a handful of private study rooms, that he’s never really paid any attention to, mostly because of the “staff only” sign on it. Arthur is about to walk past it and continue his search for the ever so evasive Merlin—he’s beginning to wonder if Barbara is fucking with him—because really, there’s only so much time he can waste before he has to actually start working, when it occurs to him that he _is_ staff now. So he pulls his key card from his pocket, taps it against the electronic pad next to the handle, which lights up green and lets out a pathetic little beep that sounds as lifeless and defeated as Arthur feels, and opens the door to find a set of stairs descending into what looks like a basement or storage area of some kind.

The door clicks shut behind him as he enters and makes his way downstairs, blinking rapidly to adjust to the suddenly harsh fluorescent lighting after spending most of his morning standing under the inescapable natural light that flooded the main floor. As he reaches the bottom of the stairs, he finds himself in an overwhelming huge room filled with rows upon rows of rickety wooden shelves, laden with thick sheets of dust, forgotten books, and cardboard boxes, stretching across the floor like a mahogany tidal wave. Metal carts, some empty and some not, are strewn around piles of boxes and stacks of chairs and foldable tables. The air is cool and Arthur shivers, the layout and concrete floors suddenly reminding him of the eerie parking garage at his dad’s office. It’s been years since he’d been there, but he still remembers fuzzy childhood memories of crying while he waited for Uther in the car, hastily wiping the tears away when he saw him approaching. 

And then, Arthur realizes that under the hum of white noise coming through the air vents, he hears someone _actually_ humming, and he doesn’t recognize the song at all, but he can somehow still tell that it’s mildly offkey. He turns to the source of the noise and to his right, at the far end of room where the row of shelves ends, he spots someone sitting on the floor with their back to him, facing the wall where a single tiny rectangular window at the very top—it must be street level, because he can see feet passing by on sidewalk outside of it—lets in a dismal patch of sunshine. The person is leaning against a box with their head ducked, so all Arthur can see is the slope of their shoulders under a plain black shirt, the pale skin of their neck creeping up to a head of messy black hair, and- _oh._ This was probably Merlin. 

“Hey,” Arthur says, walking towards him.

Probably-Merlin doesn’t look up, just continues humming in that offbeat way of his and tapping his foot against the floor. As Arthur approaches, he sees that he has earbuds in, the cord twisting its way down inside his shirt, and is engrossed in a heavy leather-bound book propped up in his lap. 

“Merlin, right?” he tries again, now standing right behind the box he’s leaning against.

When Arthur doesn’t get a response, he sighs and bends down slightly to tap him on the shoulder. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t see it coming, it’s a perfectly reasonable reaction, but he’s still startled when the guy jerks away from his touch, jumps to his feet and whirls around, brandishing the book like a weapon—and from the heft of it, probably a fairly fucking effective one too—in his hand. That’s when Arthur gets his first proper look at him. He’s slightly taller than him but much lankier, all lean lines and sharp angles, especially in the cut of his jaw and cheekbones, and looks to be around Arthur's age. Maybe a year or two older judging from the indiscernible tattoo on pale skin he can see peeking out from under the sleeve of his shirt, which is much bolder from the front, emblazoned with what looks like a graphic for some band he’s never heard of. Arthur immediately feels overdressed and wishes, not for the first time, that he wasn’t wearing these fucking khakis. 

“Jesus Christ,” the guy says, all the tension melting out of his body and blue eyes narrowing in a puzzling mixture of relief and annoyance when he takes in Arthur standing haplessly in front of him. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“Well, I tried calling you, but-”

“How did you even get down here?” He pulls out one earbud and strides past him, looking up the staircase and then eyeing Arthur suspiciously. “It’s staff only, you need a key card to get in.”

Arthur holds up his key card in response, then points at his staff badge stiffly, not sure he likes the way he was just cut off, and the guy’s eyes widen again. 

“Oh. _Ohhh._ You’re the new guy, right? Fuck me, they told me I’d be training someone today but I completely forgot, my bad. I’m Merlin.” He grins at him and his face shifts into something so disarmingly open and friendly, especially in contrast to the wary look he’d had before, that Arthur is taken aback for a moment.

“I’m Arthur.” Arthur isn’t sure if he should extend a handshake or not. It’s his first day on the job and they’re co-workers, so it feels like the proper thing to do, but given all the cursing, Merlin doesn’t seem like the formal type, and he'd probably feel a bit silly shaking another teenager’s hand like they were at some distinguished business meeting. So he just crosses his arms in front of his chest and adds, a tad reproachfully, “I’ve been looking for you for ages.”

Merlin has the decency to look sheepish. “Ah, yeah, sorry ‘bout that. It’s like the Twilight Zone down here.”

“What were you even doing?”

“Well, I was meant to be sorting through all of that.” Merlin gestures to an empty cardboard box partly hidden in the shadow of a shelf, piles of important looking documents scattered around it. “But I got distracted by-” 

“By that monstrosity you nearly clubbed me over the head with,” Arthur says, nodding at the book in Merlin’s hand. 

“Exactly,” Merlin says cheerfully, like he couldn’t care less if he’d actually done it. “So, d’you wanna, uh, help me put all this shit away, I guess? Then I can show you around or something.” He scuffs the toe of his sneakers against the box of papers.

“Yeah, sure.” Arthur nods slowly and in the back of his head, notes that Barbara had a uniquely lenient understanding of what 'showing you everything you need to know' meant. 

They both sit down in front of the box, the cold of the concrete floor creeping through the knees of his pants, and Arthur begins to leaf through the papers. They seem to be old pamphlets and info-sheets for various events the library held in past years, so he lines them up in as neat piles as he can manage and begins sorting them by event. Merlin taps at his phone for a few minutes before joining in, sighing exasperatedly as he surveys the mess. 

“Aren’t you supposed to be, like, _organizing_ these?” Arthur asks as Merlin starts shoving random papers back into the box at lightning speed, but amazingly, not crinkling any of them in his rush either.

“Yeah, and it was pure fucking torture, but now I have an excuse to not.”

“What excuse?”

There's a brief pause.

“You, obviously.” Merlin says the words slowly, like he’s wondering if Arthur is a bit dense.

And Arthur bristles at that, because he _definitely_ doesn’t like the condescending undercurrent in his tone, but Merlin looks up to meet his gaze and there’s no malice there, just the corners of his eyes crinkling upwards with a playful, teasing smile, and then Arthur can’t help it- he smiles back.


End file.
